We Can Fix That with Data

I’ve been pretty busy recently. I moved into a new house, and I’m still busy unpacking and hitting up the local home improvement stores for new plants for the front porch. This is interesting, because I don’t know anything about plants.

My guild in World of Warcraft finally entered tier 6 content, as reported by Brandon. Even though we’ve been attuned for weeks, we made our first solid attempt at Black Temple just last night, and it was the most fun raiding I’ve had for quite a while. (Was it a conscious design decision to have all of these BT bosses’ AE attacks not have a visible effect icon? Because I tend to think “hey, am I standing in the fire?” and then I look up at my effects list to confirm it, and if I don’t see something, I assume I’m not. Additionally, when there’s an effect, boss mods can use it as a trigger and play a GET OUT OF THE FIRE, MORON sound for you. I guess that we’re playing with the big kids now, and the big kids don’t need any pesky UI to play the game for them.)

It’s GDC time. I’m not going, but my company has a presence this year. If you’re a publisher and would like to spend some money, please visit our booth this week. Even if you’re not, please watch our first gameplay video.

And finally, I’m proud to announce that I’ll be giving a talk at the ION Game Conference in Seattle later this year. It’s called “Design for Longevity,” and it’s about designing infrastructure systems and tools that will make your live team not want to kill themselves five years from now.